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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

New E-Readers, New Screens Coming from iRex, Sony, and Others

In the past couple of weeks, a number of companies have announced new electronic readers, and perhaps even more importantly, have revealed a number of hints about where the underlying technology is heading.

For starters, we're seeing less expensive ebook readers. To date, most of the market has started at about $300, with Amazon's Kindle 2 recently dropping to that price point. But earlier this month, Sony announced a number of less expensive models in its Reader family, starting at $199 for a 5-inch Pocket model, with a touch screen model at $299. A company called Astak also announced a $199 5-inch model (while a five-inch screen seems a bit small, it's good to see the price points dropping).

Sony last week also announced plans to move its Sony Readers to the ePub format, an industry standard that many book publishers are pushing (as opposed to Amazon's proprietary format and DRM).

I'm far from ready to declare the format wars over. This still isn't an MP3 format vs. iTunes comparison, as both formats allow digital rights management. And also note, you can find a lot of older unprotected titles for the Kindle as well, through sites like Gutenberg.org. But it's good to see at least a hint of standardizations coming to the industry.

Some more interesting announcements are coming from iRex Technologies, a Phillips spin-off, which is already selling a 10-in e-Reader aimed at the legal and medical markets called the DS1000. That's a professional, niche product (at over $800), but the company plans to be coming out with a consumer product later this year.

iRex North American CEO Kevin Hamilton says the new product will have about the footprint of the Kindle 2 but with an 8-inch display (because it has a smaller bezel), with a stylus-enabled touch screen.

He says the goal is for this to be a "universal document reader," supporting the ePub standard, Microsoft reader, Barnes and Noble, PDFs, etc. While a formal price isn't available yet, he said he expected it to be competitive with the Kindle.

Perhaps more interestingly, the company has been showing a new color electronic ink technology that it hopes to get to market towards the end of next year or early 2011. Hamilton told me that this is high-quality, full-saturation color - and says it should look much like color in a newspaper.

Meanwhile, of course, other companies are working on new displays. In the past, I've been impressed by technologies such as Polymer Vision, which has shown a roll-up display (and claims to have color coming as well) for its Readius e-reader. Qualcomm has shown its Mirasol technology, which is a MEMS-based color technology, a number of times, and I was impressed when I saw it this spring.

With color screens, more standard formats, and lower price points, electronic book readers may be poised to become much more mainstream in the years ahead. The big question I have though, is how many people will need a dedicated device, and how many will just be reading books on their notebook or mobile phone?

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